​Marketing automation is essential for online marketers. It's not just a nice thing that adds to your productivity; it's absolutely necessary and there's one simple reason for that - It takes over routine menial tasks for you so that you can focus your time and energy on more important things.

​Saving Time for "Thinking Work"

As an online marketer, what should you be spending your time doing on a day-to-day business? Your true role as a marketer is to study your market, and plan and execute marketing strategies. In other words, it's "thinking" work.

However, when you're bogged down with simple routine tasks that anyone (or any machine) could do for you, you're losing that precious thinking and organizing time. The hours you could be devoting to really careful consideration of your brand image or mind mapping your overall marketing strategy are wasted away on busy work.

Get Routine Tasks off Your Desk

In addition to planning and organizing, another important part of marketing is building relationships. You need to be actively engaged and interacting with the members of your target market, whether on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or through face-to-face offline events or online webinars.

Relationship building, like planning and organizing, takes time. Also, relationship building tasks cannot be done by a software program, an outsourced worker across the planet, or a nifty gadget. This is work that you and only you can do.

If you can successfully automate routine tasks and get them off your to-do list, you can spend more time interacting with members of your target market, and the benefits to this are priceless.